Most scientists, many supporters of science, don’t seem to believe that past works, outmoded works—even some with serious and avoidable errors, are worth the effort of study. This is probably at least partly due to the fact that science has been so important a part of the modern cultural mainstream that scientists have naturally come to move along with the general herd, frantic scurriers, hamsters on the exercise wheel. There seems to be no contemplative time of the sort available to the gentleman naturalists of the 19th century. Darwin couldn’t be in retreat for years as he slowly formulates a grand theory in the midst of a civilization decayed so that it was out of touch with the world in its greater sense. Nowadays, scientists are supposed to be busy, taking perhaps more time to get grant money for their students than to do research or perhaps themselves junior enough or anti-establishment enough to be in the research lab or seated at their desk working on the next great hurdle to understanding the occurrence patterns of prime numbers, themselves without pattern. At the worst, scientists and many other knowledge gatherers or analysts can become parasitical intellects which chew up and otherwise dispose of the knowledge they were given, their traditions, as they seek to move on to something new. Many scientists, even those who are believing Jews or Christians and part of great traditions, are oblivious to the nature of traditions, containing not just `old’ knowledge but also the socially disciplined emotions and behaviors as well as intellects, communal minds, which form successful and complex human communities, including those of science. (See Intelligence vs. Intellect for the appropriate discussion as well as a discussion of a book by Jacques Barzun which deserves to be reprinted and spread widely.)
Let me state the point I’m making about an understanding of science itself, and the scientific aspects of the human mind, by analogy to the way in which evolutionary biologists, including some medical clinicians, understand the human organism and its `defective design’. If we take a human being, for example—my own self, as a creature designed to be what he is in the current context of his family-line, we’d have to wonder why sinuses (mine for sure) are angled to drain properly if he were a crouching animal and why his sciatic nerve passes out of the backbone and through the hip/buttocks region at an angle more appropriate for a crouching animal. Our very backbones give us so much trouble as they are partial adaptions shaped from the backbones of crouching animals.
Clearly, the human body is the result of some selection processes acting upon a crouching animal. In a meaningful sense, at least for the purpose of understanding some of our problems and trying to deal with them, we are still partly crouching creatures standing upright. This is also true of science: in some meaningful sense, modern biology is still partly Medieval and even partly Hellenistic. Similar statements can be made, with greater clarity in fact, of modern physics and mathematics and engineering. This is not a bad thing. If the human mind could be passed into a robotic thing which was engineered to rigid specifications, if that thing had only a past ending in science and engineering textbooks taken out of context, that thing would be a horror beyond even Frankenstein’s monster, the poor creature which was living and had a human past though he was alone among other human each a part of communities and members of some sort of people. Having no past, he would be timeless, without a future. A similar thing could be said about a science without a proper past, a proper context. This might be the reason why some farsighted scientists of philosophical bent, Michael Polanyi and David Ruelle among others, have expressed fears about the decay of moral standards in science—and those two men wrote of experiences from decades ago when science seemed still a Victorian Age gentleman in many ways. As I have noted in the past, modern scientists are not so much different from modern politicians and modern bankers and modern bureaucrats as they might imagine.
Choices made in the past still are present and the effects of any regrettable choices (even if they were plausibly unavoidable) have to be worked out over time by sometimes slow processes of evolution and development. Even more generally, our best thoughts still have contingent aspects which are the result of choices made by Plato or Archimedes or Galen or Newton or Cauchy or many others. In speaking of choices and contingency, I speak of those we make for our endeavors on a conscious basis and also those made by human communities and those made by the impersonal forces of history and biological evolution and so on.
I came to this line of thought while contemplating this article, Brain Development Is Guided by Junk DNA That Isn’t Really Junk. I first thought of my amused response to learning, circa 1995, that much of our DNA is inactive and probably just junk. For an example of what is truly junk, I remember that we still carry non-functioning (this is good) DNA for forms of hemoglobin for ancestral species, creatures much closer than we are to the ancestors we share with chimpanzees. From remembering that amused response, I passed on to the idea that harmful elements can remain with any and all entities which are the result of evolutionary and developmental processes. Unless there is some sort of truth to a dualistic understanding of mind vs. thing-like being, our minds are also part of this world of such processes; we fool ourselves in potentially dangerous ways when we think the evolutionary biologist studying the human brain can overcome all the problems and compromises in that brain he’s aware of. Let alone all he doesn’t know about. In fact, one of the reasons for the true conservative core to the thoughts of E.O. Wilson and other sociobiologists is their awareness that we are still part of these processes they study.
If anything, sociobiologists and scientists influenced by their insights have the typical tendency of the sort of conservatives we call `reactionaries’, tending to be a bit pessimistic about the entire situation, to not see that while we cannot escape this world’s evolutionary and development processes, we can mitigate and often overcome many, perhaps most specific problems which we can define well—in principle; we have not the time nor the energy to overcome all and we work at cross purposes when we take on too many problems. A lot of qualifiers are in the previous complex statement, and those qualifiers along with the sociobiological insights tell us that science itself is `trapped’ in this world of evolutionary and developmental processes, having to deal with inherited inadequacies and outright problems which are deeply embedded in the very nature of science as it has developed. In addition, as theorists and precursor thinkers in the field of algorithmic complexity theory have told us: we can’t foresee the future well enough to avoid making our own mistakes and leaving them to future generations. Even some of our greatest successes will turn out to be problems for future generations.
To eliminate one possible objection: any path of escape from this world’s nature for science itself would depend upon a dualistic view of reality. A mind, or at least the knowledge jammed into the brain, would have to somehow float free of the stuff of this world and the evolutionary and developmental processes which shape that stuff.
The situation is even more interesting than we might have thought. The above article, Brain Development Is Guided by Junk DNA That Isn’t Really Junk, tells us that much of that junk in our DNA isn’t junk. The particular studies dealt with in this article involve “mysterious RNA molecules” and the `junk’ DNA which are their templates. These particular bits of RNA and DNA are involved in brain development and in some diseases of the brain. They found one particular RNA molecule which is linked to the devastating Huntington’s disease—Woody Guthrie died from this.
Junk DNA isn’t always junk and neither is the inheritances from past manifestations of science which are often labeled in terms not much different from `junk!!’. For example, the ways of thought of Darwin himself about the ways of biological inheritance were a bit wrong and far from complete and yet the defective and incomplete theory of evolution which he developed is still studied by biologists and still inspires and shapes the thoughts of many of those scientists who might well come to read The Origin of Species already having technical knowledge superior to that which can be found in that book.
If scientists wish to understand human ways of thought, they need to understand how we got to a better, richer and more complex and more true, understanding of biological inheritance, they would need to understand the ways in which past generations of scientists came to their less rich and less complex and less true ideas. More than that, those ideas are with us yet and few if any evolutionary biologists would say we should stop students from studying the great works of Darwin and Huxley and other old-timers, to concentrate fully on learning some purified and more complete understanding of evolutionary biology as related in a schematic manner in a textbook.
The positivistic view of science, and the related view of individual and communal minds of scientists as being able to stand apart from the world in judgment–as it were, runs parallel to intelligent design theories they so hate. What cannot be the result of intelligent design, our universe, is to be understood, encapsulated, in a great project of reverse-engineering which is managed by way of intelligent design as biology or physics. The great intellectual sin of `intelligent design’ is the common man’s version of the positivism held by many modern thinkers, scientists as well as philosophers and by some of the intellectually ambitious or pretentious among the common folk.
Against the intelligent design view and also the similar if more intellectually respectable positivistic view of mind and empirical reality, I have argued that the human mind is so powerful because it is the result of the human being, individual and communal, responding to his own body, his environments, even all of Creation, in such a way as to encapsulate all of that in his heart and mind and hands, his thoughts and feelings and behaviors. We shape our minds to be maps, in a manner of speaking, of all that we can grasp.